Edward Cline (2013.08.03 ) Politics "One may say of that human poltergeist, Cass Sunstein, even though he left the Obama administration for the elitist fields of academic Elysium, “He’s back….” On January 30th, Maxim Lott of Fox News reported: The federal government is hiring what it calls a “Behavioral Insights Team” that will look for ways to subtly influence people’s behavior, according to a document describing the program obtained by FoxNews. Critics warn there could be unintended consequences to such policies, while supporters say the team could make government and society more efficient. Lost on all these advisors and bureaucrats is the truism that the most “efficient” society is a free one – not what they have in mind at all. An “efficient” society, if the notion has any meaning at all, is one in which the element of initiated force is morally absent from human relationships. Initiated force, whether physical or in terms of fraud or indirect force, in an “efficient” society would be treated as a crime. “Unintended consequences” can only mean the expansion of government power over everyone’s lives, and in every instance of expansion it has caused deleterious consequences in society itself. Most of these consequences are either intended, viewed as “good,” or remain unacknowledged by our de facto wardens. For example, the 16th Amendment (and its Civil War and Reconstruction Era predecessors), sanctioning a tax on private incomes, has grown from one that was a mere single digit percentage of private income of all kinds, to over 80% of it if one doesn’t have a pricy tax attorney or CPA to juggle the books and take advantage of a mare’s nest of loopholes, exemptions, and special categories. The federal income tax code has swollen from 400 pages to nearly 74,000 pages – and counting."
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 14:56:53 +0000
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